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Weekly output: games, outsourcing, Account Activity, Facebook, backup

The research for one of this week’s posts began last year. For another, it started sometime in the early 1980s, when my brother and I were allowed to open presents on Christmas Eve for the first time ever–on account of the Atari 2600 under the tree.

I had high hopes for “The Art of Video Games” exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum. But between the absence of some memorable titles (seriously, y u no have Tetris?!), and the lack of attention to such cultural aspects as the game industry’s reliance on sequels, “TAOVG” felt a little thin. I did, however, still enjoy playing a vintage copy of Pac-Man–and getting congratulated by a 10-year-old after clearing the first board.

Because I’m kind of a data nerd (and because I realized the other post I was working on could easily be held for later), I wrote about Google’s new Account Activity reports. These detail your use of a few of the Web giant’s services–just the thing for people who keep refreshing their Foursquare stats page.

This post explains a News Feed graphical mismatch in Facebook’s iOS app that was supposedly fixed by an update that should have arrived Friday night but still isn’t in the App Store as I write this Sunday night. That’s some strange latency, especially on top of the four days it apparently took Facebook–of all the companies!–to get this bug-fix release okayed by Apple. The rest of the column advises backing up the recovery partition on your computer’s hard drive, something I finally remembered to do before installing the Consumer Preview release of Windows 8.